China Investment December 2015

China: Investment growth falls to 15-year low in 2015

January 19, 2016

In 2015, urban fixed-asset investment (FAI), excluding rural households, expanded 11.0%. The reading came in well below the 15.7% increase registered in 2014 and marked the slowest pace of expansion in 15 years. Also, the print came in slightly below the 11.2% rise the markets had expected.

The slower pace observed in 2015 reflected a further deceleration in investment growth in the industrial and services sectors, while investment in the agricultural sector remained robust. The closely-watched real estate development indicator decelerated sharply in 2015, with the reading falling to the lowest annual growth rate since the trough of the financial crisis in 2009.

A month-on-month comparison shows that investment in urban fixed assets rose a seasonally-adjusted 0.68% in December, which was down from the 0.73% increase tallied in November.

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China Investment Chart

Note: Month-on-month changes of seasonally adjusted urban fixed-asset investment index and annual growth rate (year-to-date) in %. Owing to seasonal factors related to the Lunar New Year, annual figures in January and February are reported together.Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS).

Exports expanded 11.1% annually in January, coming in slightly above both December’s 11.9% increase and the 11.7% rise that market analysts had expected.
Meanwhile, imports surged to a 36.9% expansion over the same month last year in January, which overshot December’s 4.5% expansion.

The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP), fell slightly to 51.3 points in January from 51.6 points in December.

House prices in 70 large- and medium-sized cities rose 0.4% in December from the previous month, according to a weighted average index calculated by Thomson Reuters from data issued by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).